Page:A Nation in Making.djvu/182

This page needs to be proofread.
166
A NATION IN MAKING

students numbering about 2,500, and it is the only private college with a law department affiliated to the University. The financial control of the college is vested in a body of trustees, while the college and the school are administered by a council with me as President. The constitution of the Board of Trustees and of the College Council was settled by me in consultation with the Syndi- cate of the University.

I ceased to take part in professorial work in February 1913, when I was elected a member of the Viceroy's Legislative Council, and when my absence from Calcutta at Delhi and Simla made it impossible for me to be regularly associated with the work of teaching. It was with a wrench that I withdrew from duties that had been the pleasure of my life, and in which I had been engaged for over thirty-eight years. I look back with the utmost satisfaction upon my work extending beyond the lifetime of a generation, among the youthful section of my countrymen. I loved the students, . and they loved me; and I claim to have had a considerable share in moulding their minds and stimulating their aspirations. I have been charged with diffusing political ideas among them, and so I have done, and they were political ideas of the right kind, the strongest safeguards against revolutionary principles.

I have preached patriotism coupled with orderly constitutional progress. I have preached self-government within the Empire as our goal, and constitutional and lawful methods as the only means for its attainment. If to-day revolutionary principles have found acceptance among some young men in Bengal (and their number is a handful) the fact is traceable to conditions economic and political, which are more or less independent of all propagandism. The teacher or the preacher may incité, but he cannot create the nursing-ground from which the revolutionary draws his inspiration and his support. The writings of the pamphleteers would have fallen upon barren soil, if the conditions in France, political and economic, had not prepared men's minds for the acceptance of revolutionary ideas.

However that may be, it was with me always a pleasure to be in the class-room with young men, teaching, guiding, inspiring them. In their company I felt rejuvenated, and now, if in the evening of my life my optimism remains unabated, I attribute it largely to my close and constant association with young men, and the living interest I felt in them and in their welfare. The class-room was to me a training-ground. If I tried to teach the young to be